The Not Listening Tour

Daniel Greenfield

For a man with such big ears, Barack Hussein Obama isn't actually very good at listening. And a listening tour isn't going to change that.

Listening tours have become an obligatory stage of the early campaign, but their name is another degradation of meaning. Politicians don't conduct listening tours in order to listen to voters, but to have those voters listen to them. The occasional town hall meeting with its exchanges is the verbal version of a Letters to the Editor column. But does anyone pretend that a newspaper exists to listen to the readers?

Selfless euphemisms for selfish agendas clot the language of liberals. A listening tour dresses up the self-seeking campaign as a selfless act. The politician isn't on tour for his own sake, but to listen to you. The left called its totalitarian states, people's republics, when the people had nothing to do with it. And the listening tours have as much to do with listening to people, as the republics did with being ruled by them.

The Nation's editor, Katina vanden Heuvel insists that Obama should fight for "the People's Budget". This budget being a thing apart from the budget that the people actually want. The People's Budget was produced by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, consisting of left-wing loons and crooks like Charlie Rangel, John Conyers, Barney Frank, Keith Ellison, Alcee Hastings and Shirley Jackson- Lee.

It's hard to think of a segment of the people represented by crooked millionaires, many of whom were bribed into supporting the AT&T merger, who are above the law, and helped tank the economy with the frauds that they supported and oversaw.

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Lean close to sniff at the messaging apparatus of the Democratic Party and it smells like the sweat of a car salesman's armpit. Behind the fake greek columns, the new logos and the social media is a crook trying to unload a lemon on you at twice the price. And if you buy now, he'll throw in a 15 trillion dollar deficit. Now the crook is driving around on a listening tour in his Death Star buses promising more jobs and lower deficits and a hill of magic beans.

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Listening to someone means accepting the idea that there are things you don't know, and things you may be wrong about. That's hard to do when you're working from a philosophy that insists problems can be solved by following a rigid social or economic plan from a tenured academic. Why would you listen to someone who doesn't even have a PhD and is several social classes below you? Instead you smile patiently while he's talking and then explain to him why he's wrong. And it that doesn't work, you pretend to agree with him, while explaining that both of you actually share the same agenda. Your agenda.

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If Obama were going to listen to the people, he had plenty of opportunities after he was elected. Instead he spent three years ignoring the people, condescending to the people, lecturing the people and vacationing at expensive places and overseas destinations to get away from the people. And his convoy tour is there to impress and awe the common folk with the scale of it. Like Putin staging a fake hunt or finding a trinket that was set there for him to find, this isn't about listening. It's about impressing. In both senses of the word.

The Not Listening Tour is supposed to remind us of Obama's importance, his easy manner and how photogenic he is. All qualities manufactured for him by media coverage. It's supposed to awe us with his entourage, and his wealth, which is really our wealth. It's not a listening tour, it's just another royal procession at public expense. And while kings may occasionally talk to commoners. They don't listen to them. Instead they toss some gold coins out the window, wave and drive on.

Read the whole thing. Wish I had said that.